


the crown came from over the sea (for the love of gold)

by BannedBloodOranges



Category: Return to Treasure Island (TV 1986), Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
Genre: F/M, First Love and for a long while an only love, Grief, Long John Silver is a bastard (but you already know that), Memories, Period-Typical Racism, Piracy, Reminiscing, Selfishness, mild pre-slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-14 14:53:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14771771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BannedBloodOranges/pseuds/BannedBloodOranges
Summary: He hears her voice in the tide."The coast is clear in sight, and he can see it, mirages shuffling amongst the rolling white drifts on the yellow sands, and he sees her, in the space between the sky and sea, standing proud, waiting. When he arrives, there is naught but sea and sand."





	the crown came from over the sea (for the love of gold)

**Author's Note:**

> There's a poignant moment in the mini series where John Silver offers comfort to Abed Jones, friend of Jim Hawkins and escaped slave, about his prospects on land, and talks about a black woman full of spirit, a true lady, and of course, he says her name was "Miss Long John Silver." The joy and pride of her memory is touched with pain, for when Abed questions if she is long since dead, Long John turns away, and smokes his pipe in silence.
> 
> I own nothing, non profit fun only.

He is not a young man when he meets her, but young enough to appreciate fine form in men and women, but it is different shapes that draw his eyes, the rigid telltale straight of bound breasts, the flattening of heavyweight hips in baggy trousers. Her head is shorn of hair, gold earrings balmy light against her umber skin, and she never speaks, if only to chuckle and keep to herself. To the other men she is merely a mute man, an escaped slave they carried away to work the galleys. Slowly but surely, John Silver has seen the “mute” pick each pocket of the crew as they slept, and when they came into port, he is the only man left with his earnings.

But John Silver has always been cleverer than most, and he finds her later in the local inn, breasts loose beneath her serving blouse, and when she sees him, her smile became tight and dangerous, her hands twisted in her skirts where the purse bulges.

“They say havin’ a woman aboard is bad luck,” Silver says smoothly. “But I hear havin’ an opportunistic one is twice the bad but, I am willing to shoulder the karma, if you so wish, missy.”

“That not be my name,” She retorts, and up close, he can see that she too, has years behind her, years that have made her swift, powerful, and they circle each other like vultures.

“Well, then,” He takes his hat off, and offers his hand. “If we are to be cordial, then let me know it, and we can do business.”

 

* * *

 

 

 The day she becomes Adetokunbo Silver he is forty-two and her thirty-eight, and they do it right and proper, Parson and choir in church, the sunlight through the stain glass a sweet colourful ripple on them both.

 She dresses in gold and him in Admiral blue, and they stand together, the Parson stuttering through their vows.

 “What I have is yours,” he tells her.

 “What I have is mine first and yours second,” is her reply.

 He laughs uproariously at that, even with the agony of his leg, for mere months before he had lost it, and she sworn and cursed his good captain as she had tended to him, and during the mad heat of his fever he had begged her to stay, to marry him.

 “I don’t need you,” She says. “You need me. Don’t forget that Johnny, for the tide may turn and you keep your wife in good faith, for Miss Silver shall be waiting, keeping the home and the hearth.”

 “And the riches I shall bring you, love,” He  interrupts, kissing her hands and neck.

 “That be the point of it all!” She smiles, and her smiles make her lovely, and so before a God he hath or shall give no blood for, he kisses her, and the choir sings on.

 

 

* * *

 

 Late one afternoon he wakes, by thunder, and the Spyglass Inn is empty, the door bolted shut. He rises fully and from the window spies her paddling in the bay, strong black legs stood among the breaking waves, her skirt held up and her head back, dying sun on her bare neck and shoulders.

 Fetching his hat, he leaves the inn, hopping brisk across the grass, and when he reaches the shores, keeps his distance, for he knows many a swab who is a frightener of women, but she turns her head toward him, hands outstretched.

 “Do you like what you're looking at?” The women in the docks have rough voices, hard and plucked. Hers is soft and deep, rolling her vowels. Her heavy dark eyes flash in the shades of the setting sun, and where her blouse has stooped in the breeze, he sees the high scars against her back, lashed into the skin, beyond mend.

 “The sunset is a mighty fine thing,” he removes his hat. There is nobody nearby, just the roar of sea and the woman, melded at the ankles by the tide, as if she belongs there.

 Her laughter rolls from her tongue like pearls, and from across the beach he goes to meet her.

* * *

 

 

There are no children.

 “We be too old to try,” he says. The blankets are rumbled, tossed between them. When he breathes, visible air steams from his mouth and he curses, for he damns the cold, damns their lack of money and lack of means, damns their increasing ages and the bounty he knows lies sleeping beneath high green trees and beautiful poisonous plants.

 “That be the truth of it,” She answers, quiet, her thick back turned away from his mountainous shoulders. “Make no mistake.”

 “If we were young,” he bellows, too loud. “If we were young and had means! If I were whole, and you…”

 “That be the truth of it!” She snaps. “Make no mistake.”

 They lie together, and apart.

* * *

 

 

When Silver hears of the map, his lady wife is among her beloved patrons, serving food and stories both. Miss Ade Silver is moving slower these days, not that John has noticed, for there are plans to make and old shipmates to call to court.

 That night, he plots over candles burnt low, and he hisses in his rage between his teeth, for Treasure Isle burns like an emerald in his eye, and here be the map, owed to him by rights, under the authority of an idiot squire and a wet eared child.

 “Are you coming to bed, Johnny?” Ade’s shape fills out the door. Gold light on her bare neck and shoulders, shined with sweat, and the sight is enough to give Silver pause.

 “Love?” He asks, rising slow. “You sick?”

 “It be just the humidity,” She utters. “The rhymey air, makes me breath hard.”

 “You go to bed, then,” He sits back down. “I will follow.”

 That night, he doesn’t. Instead, he sleeps over melted wax and brown paper, dreaming of turning clouds and the flares of cannon fire, of a burst of agony beneath his left thigh, and the howl of his memory wakes him, for there are cries above, filling the Inn. He falls as he tries to mount the stairs to reach her, his crutch broken in two beneath his weight.

 

* * *

 

 

There is no pretty end. The nights pass and go in fevers. She sleeps most days and wiles away the nights in delirium. She cries in a language he does not understand and calls for names upon for which he has no memory, and he can do not more then sit and touch her hand, as the voyage for Treasure Island draws trantilizingly closer.

 Two days before the ship’s berth, Ade turns her head and sees him right, finally.

 “It be considerate of me,” she whispers through spit cracked lips. “To die before you go to seek your fortune.”

 “Always thinking ahead, Ade,” He has her hand tight in his. “But what’s all this about dying, now? We have a deal. I need you more then ye need me, by the stars, and dear, we married proper, a gentlemen’s agreement.”

 “Hm.” When she looks at him, her eyes are as dusky and bright as a harvest moon. “You always be a joker, John Silver, and that be why I married ye, but…”

 “You married me for my humour?” He leans back, squeezing her arm. “Why I do not remember that part of the arrangement.”

 She grins wearily.

 “I lied.”

 “And here I thought lay a Christian woman,” he announces, taking her hand to his heart, but she pulls back, enough strength left in her to pull him to her.

 “There be no Christian bone in this body, and when you lay me down, I hope you remember, Johnny,” She rolls her head onto the pillow. Their bedroom is squat and dark. The curtains are closed against the tide, the sunlight. “But have it be known, that I believe that map to carry a curse, John, and against my wish, you pursue it still.”

 “It’ll be the making of us, love.” He has no time nor place for fury. Her like this, the years being what they have been, it is the least he owes her. “I’ll come back for ye, and we’ll be rich as kings.”

 “Oh yes,” she murmurs, her words whittling away to a whisper. “What riches will ye find, John? New riches? I was never as rich as the day I clapped eyes on you, Long John Silver.”

 If she means it, she does not say, for she said many things in the past she did not mean, but if he went to ask her, he would find no reply, for she is still, her tremors finally abated.

 In their hovel, he weeps, teeth gritted against his sobs rising hot and fast from his throat. He takes her head and lies it against his chest, combing his fingers through her hair, and for an hour at most, he stays like that, as beyond the window, the sun sets upon the white water.

 

* * *

 

 

“You are no man, Mr Silver,” Ade whispers as he hacks his way through the undergrowth, a boy roped to his waist, who trips and bloodies his knees amongst the thorns and dock leaves. “You have become worse then ‘im, worst then the captain who cost you your leg.”

He had not thought of her. Blood, boiling belly heat and the crack of the cat o’nine tails, the tip of the black spot and men falling from fever. That gold, that delicious contraband, waiting for him, so many years of waiting he had done, his his _his_ …!

And he had not thought of her.

 He thinks he hears her cry out, in pain and fever, and he flutters back, as if wounded, only to see Jim Hawkins picking himself up from the ground, cut from the bracken. The knot around his waist is frayed, as if the boy has been picking it, and he shrinks as Silver advances, too quick, too stained with cruelty.

 Hawkins’s eyes are suddenly huge, dark and full as a harvest moon, made fat with fear, and Silver freezes, his crutch half raised, and the buzzing of flies and the rush of tide and the howls of his men surround like a whirlwind.

 “Step quick, Hawkins,” He hisses, irate. “Step quick and don’t trip.”

* * *

 

_“Adetokunbo,” she states. “That be my name, but for your kind’s clumsy tongue, you can call me Ade.”_

_“That sounds awful familiar,” He smacks his lips, considering. “I believe I have heard it before, in the colonies.”_

_“It means crown from the sea,” she says, and the sunlight through the open inn door – gold, gold, gold – shimmers her face like a halo, gold gold -_

**Gold.**

The longboat is light with gold, a satchel, barely enough to buy a new inn. The Hispaniola is a shadow on the horizon, now a home to a boy who looks upon him with cold eyes. The coast is clear in sight, and he can see it, mirages shuffling amongst the rolling white drifts on the yellow sands, and he sees her, in the space between the sky and sea, standing proud and waiting.

The light ripples like through stain glass, and there be naught but the sea and the sand, and he wonders if he saw Flint beside her, and Hands, and all the other devils of his crew, but as the boat washes ashore, he tugs himself up, free from the sea, and alone.


End file.
